This past weekend I walked in my first gay pride parade. I have been to pride parades in multiple cities and have seen the regional differences between them, but this was the first one in which I participated. It was kind of a bittersweet moment for me, though not in the traditional sense. I walked with an LGBT alumni group from my alma mater, and immediately coming up to that group where we were staging I felt unwelcome. It reminded me of my days during undergrad when I thought it was just the fact that I was with a ‘different’ group than I normally hung out with, but no, most of the gay boys there were palpably unfriendly toward outsiders (those of us who weren’t already in their club). The sweet part of the parade was the sheer number of people who came out to watch all of the floats come by and truly rejoice on our holiday. Every year I forget how many of us there are out there and how joyful it is to come together and be proud of one’s identity.
Because June is historically ‘gay appreciation’ month (due to the Stonewall Riots of the late 1960s happening at the end of June), PBS and others have been presenting some great information on gay history. First there was a documentary I saw with a fellow queer about the Stonewall Riots themselves and now I’m checking out a similar documentary on Netflix about gay culture before Stonewall. Essentially what I’ve learned is how far we’ve come as a minority group since…well…being generally accepted in society.
When I moved out to California for grad school in the mid-2000s I was disappointed in the lack of overt gay culture anywhere. Sure I was studying in a quiet, touristy destination, but I needed to be with the gays at some point, damn it! I came to learn that there’s noticeably less overt gay culture outside of San Francisco not because Californians hate the gays, but because the gays are so much more accepted into mainstream culture that there’s no real reason to ostracize oneself from the fold—you were genuinely accepted as you were. What a concept.
Watching these documentaries talking about how if you wore the same color handkerchief as your tie, that just meant you were gay. And it was some sort of Earth shattering that women…<gasp>…would wear trousers to work during World War II because their skirts could get caught in the machinery. Because of these ‘innovations,’ women were freer to not only wear pants but also make their own money and not necessarily leave their parents’ house because they were pregnant. It blew me away that men were expected to wear ties in civilized society; I think of think as a throwback to the turn of the century, but I suppose that only a generation away from then you’d still have the regular masses still keeping to that social norm.
Even watching a special about “Wigstock” that was shot in the mid-90s demonstrates how far the gay community has come. Instead of being campy and overly flamboyant, there are those of us these days who simply blend in consider our sexual orientation and just one of the many facets that make us who we are. There are, of course, still amazingly fabulous drag queens too.
